There is a fundamental alienation in this new digital age. Like a surreal melody that fills empty deserts with cardboard, there is nothing tragic or radical here. Will the world end like this? It’s possible. A pantomime without big eschatological motives.
A legitimate and justified scenario would need Hannah Arendt, so it’s not even worthwhile to tackle it asking yourself why – there’s so much in the way of dire incoherence and superficiality. The radical question, for sure, is the veiled anonymity that permeates mass communications and that creates a void in direct personal responsibility. As if entrusting words and intentions to the “net” was a semi-serious game, a divertissement, for which basically no one is “responsible” for what he or she does or says, all without the slightest foundation or critical sense. Warning! Trusting to the wind means the risk of being overturned.
These virtual behaviours are then reproduced, without landing a blow, in real everyday life. But remember that a word is a sound, and every sound is an action, so it has its own concreteness. It influences our condition, our behaviour and the choices we make. It expresses a state, often a will. So you are as responsible for a word as you are of a deed.
This new species of inconsistency, this sort of mortal illness, is also affecting the human consortium.
Here it is just too easy to cite contingent political praxis, the prevailing demagogy or the economic commodification of every cultural sphere as well as the obvious signs of fairly advanced ethical rot. Rather, it is more refined to examine the psychological aspects that culminate in the decadence of human relationships, especially affective ones, reduced to fetishes at the mercy of an unclean egotism and futile whims. Radical individualism and relativism are the obvious results of this unstoppable fall.
I will be prophetic.
Many are hurt in this new world. Few of the older generation know how to ride it.
We are marching with great strides towards a new existentialism that will produce waves of seductive aesthetes and a legion of artists immersed in creative trance. A circus at the end of the world for the crazy joy of an uprooted and twisted population that will dance in the ruins, unable to think of anything but their own debacle.
It will remain only a personal, useless, yet arrogant rebellion.